CardCastle MTG

I’ve been looking for a reliable scanning app with a web portal to manage my magic the gathering collection for a while. All in all most either look terrible or perform terribly over prolonged use. CardCastle is not like the others. The app not only looks great, it performs even better. Fast and smooth and accurate unlike every app I’ve used recently. I have a blank sheet of paper that I have on my desk that I use as my backdrop and CardCastle nails it every time. The best of the rest I’ve tried struggle under the same conditions. The online user interface is even better. The portal allows you to manage your collection and capture pricing, build decks, easy import and export... it’s just hands down the smoothest collection tool I have ever used... in fact it’s one of the smoothest cloud-based software programs I have ever used period! If you want to support the developer, which I highly encourage anyone do if you like the software, the pricing simple and straightforward, no complex set related garage to confuse you. You can do monthly or a whole year at a time. Check out the tool and tryout the online portal, you won’t regret it!

I downloaded and tried virtually every other mtg card scanner and all of them either didn’t work well or limited you to a certain number of scans before paying. This app lets you scan unlimited but only browse the first 1000 cards before paying. And the fee is only $4 a month which isn’t bad compared to competitors. The ability to export my collection is HUGE as well, as I would not have taken the time to scan my cards without knowing I had that flexibility to back them up and use the card collection data elsewhere as well. There are only a few cards out of the hundreds I’ve scanned so far that it doesn’t read properly, despite trying it in different lighting and angles. Otherwise, no complaints!

Although sometimes hard to scan the cards it is definitely worth the trouble. It gets your card right pretty much every time and if it messes up which set your card is from you can just click on it to change it. The best part about it is that it makes looking up your cards for their average prices easy and not the mind numbing hastle it normally becomes plus even better is that this app will update the prices as opposed to you having to research every card up for the price changes it just does it for you. Better yet it keeps a collection of your cards that you can look through when you don’t have your physical cards near you or to show off to friends.

The app is great. It was a little unclear for me at first how to actually add cards to your “collection” because the collection scanner adds the cards to a staging area before actually registering them to your collection. I think that’s a great feature because you can remove double scans and change foil/condition before making anything official. Overall not even a real problem since I’m just a bozo who wasn’t reading. Maybe a quick page in the tutorial about card scanning that shows the user that add to collection button from the staging screen would be useful.

...so I’m trying out CardCastle. So far, pretty good. Like MTG manager, land set recognition is spotty at best, but I like the staging area and can quickly change to proper set. Other card recognition is about 85%, but I only scanned one Commander Set... maybe newer blocks will be better. Wish I could change card quantity in staging area, that would be nice and quicker. Tried to upload a .csv file for part of my collection to play around with more, but it didn’t take. Support said they would handle, so I’m hopeful they will work it out. Overall I’d say the sort, search, filters, etc. make this App superior than MTG Manager right now and others I’ve toyed with. Love the online management as well. I must for any App. Will probably run on both Apps for a while and dive deeper to see what works best. I like CardCastle though, and would recommend to friends.